Two Poems By: Emily Toder
Karl Smith
, February 16th, 2014 05:32

New writing this week comes in the form an unlikely and unsettling love letter to a Norfolk seaside town via Brooklyn-based poet Emily Toder

Emily Toder was born in Manhattan. Her first collection, Science, was published by Coconut Books in 2012.

Her second, Beachy Head, is due out from same later this year.

Cromer

Popular, unpopular Cromer
beats in grey
heavily to the chest
sanding its salt
in the real soft
blooded among us

It’s a coastal town
It’s a place of hard grey cliff
secretly I believe its lure
lies half mostly to me

In its mute tides
In its colorless livid tides
In its quiet neap tides

I cannot decipher
what lure it has to others

To me it is very simple
To me it is utterly awful
How I could see the wharf
and I was unaffected
by the violence

Cromer II

Why does Cromer still exist?
Cause it’s on the earth
enough above the sea

My regret
does not suit
the word
but the word is mine now
and it walks out onto the wharf
and it guts the ﬁsh
and it wraps the ﬁsh in news
and it is friends with the chess

I am not the only woman
in the world
I realize
Did you think I thought
I was the only woman in the world?
My mother
is the only woman
in the world
Did you think I thought I was?
My father thinks this
I never thought this

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